Finally committed to setting up a brand new Skyrim setup after some years. My old computer died in 2021 and took my entire load order, custom tweaks and all, with it. And then the AE modpocalypse kerfuffle happened and I went and got really into Final Fantasy XIV for a while.

 

What really gave me the final push to dive back in was playing Dragon's Dogma 2. That game is severely flawed in many fundamental ways, but the support healer playstyle is actually viable in that game and it tickled a part of my subby backbrain that had lain dormant for a while and made me go "I wonder how Skyrim/Devious Followers is doing, I should call her".

 

It's been a fun homecoming. Not just on the lewd side, but on the non-lewd side as well. The Skyrim mod community appears to have weathered a second sundering and coalesced around the new "AE" version, more or less. Having a new rig that didn't have mediocre specs a decade ago has broadened my horizons, too.

 

On the LL end, it's been interesting to see myself basically speedrun over the same ground I tread before in terms of rediscovering my mod preferences. It's been long enough that I've forgotten most of the institutional knowledge, but at the end of the day my preferences are the exact same. Lots of strange moments of deja vu like "I have no memory of this place... but I've been here before".

 

Thought I'd make a record for future me of the "cornerstone" mods I use for a DF-style game:

 

Devious Followers Continued SE (of course)
Basically unchanged since I stopped playing. There is a Redux version that looks promising with a bunch of modernizations, but the page went down and I think is still waiting to be picked up. The old Lupine version works well though. The core idea and implementation of the mod remain really solid and is generally the mod I build my lewd load order around. I really love the slow fall. There's always a period in the beginning where almost no lewd stuff is happening, but that early period is crucial because it gives you an emotional context for the "status quo" so that it feels so much more powerful when that idyllic status quo is subverted later.

 

I go light on the other lewd mods when I play a DF game. They tend to be unneeded distractions when the main meal is the slow-bubbling tension that is your shifting relationship with your devious follower. Basically all you need is Devious Followers, plus maybe a mod that does cursed chests, for those unpredictable spikes of debt that can kickstart the DF debt spiral.

 

The default settings mostly work. I went with the Hard exponent curve, which seems to work well in always threatening to put you on the back foot.

 

I wanted initially to grab Torvar as my DF (drunk junior Companion who just joined to fight), and I also considered Erik the Slayer in Rorikstead, but in the end I gravitated towards Belrand again. The wily old sellsword trope is a natural fit for this kind of story. Plus he has a pretty good XVASynth voice set, on top of an unusual amount of vanilla lines.

 

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Deviously Enchanted Chests

I find what tends to work here is setting it so keys only drop when you have devices on you, and then also tune the key drops to lower rates, because they drop from even sources like gathering nodes. This just works if all you want is cursed loot with no extra frills.

 

The other alternative I tried I found very intrusive and terminally bloated. It's that old-fashioned style of mod that has such severe scope creep that it's essentially an idiosyncratic grab bag of the creator's fetishes and reaches its tendrils into far-reaching parts of the game it has no business touching. (I'm a little grumpy about it.)

 

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SM Essential Player SE

Similarly a lightweight mod that does mostly one thing - make the player essential. No need for baroque defeat mods with a billion finicky options that are impossible to parse and troubleshoot, since combat failure is already punished heavily by Devious Followers. You do want the player to be essential, because otherwise the game lets you off the hook by automatically reloading to a save before when you fucked up. Remain in this bad timeline and suffer the consequences of your own incompetence.

 

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Dynamic Timescale SE

I use this to increase the timescale in the wilderness and reduce it in cities and interiors. I use 36-6-3 for non-combat timescale in wilderness, cities and interiors respectively (with 3-3-3 for combat). I find this works in making the province feel bigger, and long-distance travel is a major, risky undertaking.

 

In my current DF playthrough when I made the trip from Whiterun to Ivarstead lots of things went wrong in the interim and around Hilgrund's Tomb. I had to make a decision to either turn back to Whiterun to convert my loot to gold I can pay my debt with, or push on to Ivarstead and risk the merchant there having only a small purse. A genuinely interesting dilemma that I had to think hard about, and it came about organically. (Of course at the time I forgot that Ivarstead had no general merchant at all...)

 

It was a tough decision because with the wilderness timescale set so high, the journey takes about two in-game days, and those days aren't free - my DF needs his fair share, too. It synergizes with DF in a pretty perfect way.

 

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Living Takes Time / Time Flies SE

I used LTT this time, but I think I used mostly the latter before. Both work. The main purpose is to make it so you can't just do a bunch of crafting and instantly gain a bunch of gold. With every potion crafted taking time now, it's a risky tradeoff - alchemy and enchanting can still be incredibly lucrative later on but early on you really have to budget some time and buffer pay to level them. I set crafting potions to take about 15 mins.

 

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Immersive Spell Learning - DESTified
Makes learning spells take time as well. It's pretty elegantly implemented for maximum compatibility - when you first get a spell tome, you get a popup to make notes, which destroys the tome but doesn't teach you the spell yet. You then have to spend a certain amount of hours modified by your skill at that discipline studying the notes before the spell unlocks. For normal playthroughs I'd usually go for x1.5 to x2.5 time to study since I like the idea of learning spells taking special effort, but for DF the default x1 is more sensible.

 

In the context of DF, I feel it adds some interesting tension to the DF experience as it's yet another time sink that has to be weighed against going out there and getting loot to pay debt. Do I want to go do that dungeon now, or can I afford to let debt accumulate a bit so that I can learn this new spell that might save me from paying for a bunch of follower bleedouts when shit hits the fan?

 

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House rules:

 

- no reloading except to fix bugs. The devious follower will attempt to get away with some blatantly unfair bullshit, and it's important to let him get away with it. It's easy to cheese by savescumming, but you shouldn't. It should feel majorly unfair - that's the appeal at the core of DF, I think. You can see the exploitative dynamic you're trapped in and feel yourself losing ground, but you're still forced to play your devious follower's games.

- no fast travel. This is a big one. Fast travel tends to make the map feel small, and points in between quest and vendor hubs tend to fade away into "flyover country". In exchange I bump my carryweight up significantly with "player.modav carryweight".

- do not loot armor or clothing, unless enchanted. I think this started out as a roleplay thing (didn't want to strip dead bodies naked), but I find that cutting dungeon loot proceeds by half does help with not completely outpacing the devious follower's debt demands.

 

A house rule I'm no longer that keen on:

 

- no attacking enemies directly, support your tank like a good little healslut. I love the idea of being a weak pathetic healer cowering behind a tank doing all the murder. But the problem is that follower AI in this game is staggeringly incompetent on a basic level if you remove player aggression from the equation. It's annoying to see Devious Followers artfully build up an image of the DF being highly intelligent and in control through dialogue and mechanics only for that illusion to shatter when you see the devious follower repeatedly take arrows to the face in combat because he cannot wrap his tiny brain around the concept of stairs.

 

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I have a slightly different set for lewd-flavored Skyrim that isn't centered on Devious Followers, but I'm still figuring that one out.

 

Anyway. I don't know how to wrap this up. I like this game, It's a blast. Thanks for coming to my ted talk

 

The end of the prologue. Driven to desperation by mounting debt imposed by a devious follower, Sister Daena, stranded in Skyrim, makes a deal. The fall begins here.

 

"That mouth was not made for prayer, slut. Get to work."